Daddy Loves His New 20Mbps

I’ve been a fan of fast internet ever since I used my first T1. I might have been a bit young (and naive), but I thought everyone should have one at home (instead of a stinkin’ dial-up). Eventually, when DSL arrived I was one of the first to sign up in my area – only to find out that I wasn’t actually eligible for this nirvana. When I moved in with my future wife, however, I got to enjoy the pleasures of DSL and the speed associated with it.

So, I became a DSL zealot. I dislike Comcast as a rule, and sided with DSL over cable modem whenever asked (and usually when I wasn’t). I explained the differences, and how DSL’s speed was a function of distance (how far you were from the trunk, which was about 2 blocks from us) and cable’s was a function of users (if you’re neighbors want to be online, too, you all get sucky speeds).

We upgraded to high-speed DSL a couple years back, moving up to the blazing 5Mbps speed – which never actually beat about 3Mbps, but that was okay because it was still 4x faster than our old one. Then my wife gave me a surprise this week – we’re getting fiber optics put in, and fiber optics meant I was getting 20Mbps speeds. TWENTY MEGABITS PER SECOND. I think I had a Pavlovian response right on my desk at work.

Coming home last night, I came home and tried it out – indeed, our download speeds are 19.5 – 21.2Mbps, and uploads nearly 5Mpbs, meaning that stuff flies on the web. And Daddy likes that.

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3 Responses to “Daddy Loves His New 20Mbps

  • FIOS is good stuff, we’ve had it a for a few months now and haven’t had any issues. gotta love that speed especially being so much cheaper than cable

  • I have always preferred cable modems, primarily for the ease of configuration (simple DHCP). This is particularly useful since I never know what operating system I’m going to want to connect with. I know the argument about cable modems being slower during high traffic times, but in practice, I haven’t had that problem since about 2000 or 2001. Sure, the speed fluctuates somewhat during the day, but it’s always acceptable, and sometimes it’s blazingly fast.

    My cable company recently increased the speed of my connection at no additional cost to me. Now it’s rated at 10 Mbps. Honestly, I haven’t noticed that much difference when it comes to downloading stuff (some servers just can’t keep up with that rate to begin with), but my upload rate has doubled, too, now I upload at 100 kiloBYTES per second.

    I almost got DSL after I moved back to Bloomington, except that the DSL service was FULL in my area. They told me I could wait to do some network upgrades … on a timescale of months. I think not. At any rate, I am happy with my cable modem. The only drawback is that it is indeed more expensive.

  • Apertome – I will admit that I’m not a fan of cable modems mostly due to Comcast cable and their notoriously shodding service. Almost everyone I know that had it has bailed, except those who have to share or just don’t use it enough to really care.

    That being said, I’m loving my new toy…

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